van Vogt, A. E. – “Process” (1950)

07/10/2012

A vignette attempting, for once, to have some actually alien aliens, a forest possessing some sort of slow-moving, aggregate, hivemind intelligence. That’s pretty much all there is to it, though: a space ship lands, the forest leeches Uranium 235 out of the soil to use atomic explosions to drive away the ship, then realizes it can use this against the other continent-spanning forest on the planet (hint, hint). It’s implied at the end that maybe this was all a trick by the space ship to be able to get easy access to uranium?